


Fractals & Flames

by fivethingsunmixed



Series: A Drop of Sun, A Drop of Ice [1]
Category: Frozen (2013), Tangled (2010)
Genre: Dark, Existential Angst, F/M, Pregnancy, Sickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 19:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivethingsunmixed/pseuds/fivethingsunmixed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Energy cannot be created or or destroyed. It can only be transformed. Or: another way of thinking about the problem of Elsa and Rapunzel. Elsa + Rapunzel centric featuring angst, dark!fic themes, a smidgen of Latin and SCIENCE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fractals & Flames

**Author's Note:**

> The modern Caesarean was not invented until 1881, by a German gentleman. Neither Frozen nor Tangled give an exact date as to when they are taking place, but the general fashion and technology indicates probably a period long before that time. For the purposes of this fanfic, we're going to quietly ignore that. So, if you desperately feel the need to inform me I got this wrong, suppress it. I know.  
> On the other hand, if you want to give me constructive criticism, give me PLENTY! I love constructive criticism. Flames will be used to make coffee.

_The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed._

**i.** **Maturity**

It is Rapunzel’s twenty-first birthday, and nothing is wrong.

The castle – the entire _kingdom_ – of Corona is awash with ribbons, with banquets, with celebrations. Her parents are aglow with joy, Eugene is smiling at her with that uncommonly gentle look her wears only when he thinks no one can see or – more likely these days – when he thinks she looks so beautiful he just doesn’t care if the world sees, and Rapunzel _has a family_.

Oh, there are rumours. A few days ago she heard that there had been no word from the ambassador they sent to Arendelle to witness the coronation of their new queen, and that there had been the most frightful storm surrounding Arendelle; but Rapunzel is happy, and young, and Eugene is smiling at her.

Nothing is wrong today.

Today.

**ii.** **Glacier**

Elsa is pleased (and not even slightly surprised) when Kristoff comes before her, gracious as only one raised by the trolls can be, to ask permission to court her sister.

She hides her amusement behind queenly imperiousness and grants it, before smiling wickedly and winking at him. Kristoff drops all pretense of politeness and grins back, boyish and charming, and oh, this one, _this one_. If Hans had courted Anna a thousand years, Elsa never would have granted permission; something in his eyes had been too like the cloud that comes in at winter’s height, crystalline and bitter and willing to choke the life out of the innocent.

But Kristoff’s eyes are as clear and cool as the first glacier.

As Kristoff leaves to go tell Anna, Elsa remembers, briefly, that moment when she stood in her ice palace, and recalls that as glaciers move, the valleys they leave behind soon fill with life.

**iii.** **Blood**

Rapunzel is painting a lantern when the news comes.

Her picture is of the family she now has – her mother, her father, herself, Eugene – even dear Maximillian and Pascal.

She is painting the jewels in her father’s crown, each one perfect and bright when a knock on the door gently startles her.

“I’ll get it,” says Eugene. Rapunzel giggles – Eugene has been getting steadily more and more frustrated with his inability to paint as lovely a lantern as he would like, and Rapunzel has been trying hard not to giggle at the frustrated pouts he’s been making at her direction.

Eugene opens the door to reveal a pale guard who looks at Rapunzel nervously.

“U-u-uh, Your Highness…”

“Please, Frederick, there’s no need to be nervous,” says Rapunzel, smiling brilliantly at the guard as she turns in her seat, “What is it?”

“…it’s the King.”

The tone of his voice.

The clatter of the paintbrush as it lands, splattering red across the perfect lantern.

The odd, out-of-place thumping that Rapunzel’s feet make on the floor – she’s running, and as she run she limps, and she doesn’t know why. Not yet.

Eugene, calling her name, desperate and frightened, yet oddly resigned.

And then, her mother, finally, saying, quiet:

“It’s too late. He’s gone.”

It all makes for a nightmare that repeats, over and over in Rapunzel’s head for the rest of the day, into the evening, long into the night, as she sits in her chair and stares out the window.

Behind her, Eugene picks up the ruined lantern and sighs.

“It was a stroke,” he says.

Rapunzel says nothing.

“Goldie, everyone has to go sooner or later.”

Still nothing.

“You couldn’t have saved him.”

A tiny whimper, like a baby suffering from its first nightmare, and then Eugene’s arms are filled with a weeping princess, and he settles to comforting her.

**iv. First Meeting**

When the Queen of Arendelle hears news of the death of the King of Corona, she sends Anna and Kristoff as their ambassadors to express their deepest condolences.

“And,” she tells Olaf as she reads trade reports, “if _this_ doesn’t get Kristoff to propose to Anna, _nothing_ will.”

“Yup!” replies Olaf, “a holiday in the sun! Just what they both need!”

Elsa laughs, and then sobers.

“I doubt they’ll get much sun…” she sighs, dismissing dark thoughts, before conjuring an ice rose and giving it to Olaf, who giggles in delight and trots off.

Two weeks later, Anna and Kristoff return, both red-cheeked from the sea-winds, and ask for her blessing to wed. Elsa doesn’t even feign queenliness when she grants it, and then Anna is swept off her feet in the kiss that Kristoff gives her.

The wedding is massive, huge enough to warrant a visit from the Princess of Corona and her Consort. Anna and Kristoff introduce her, and Elsa feels…odd. The woman before her is her height, with short brown hair, and huge green eyes that look like they probably smile a lot. Right now they’re wistful. Elsa feels her hands clenching into fists and doesn’t even realize it until her palms start to hurt. She blinks, before smiling graciously.

“Greetings, Your Majesty,” says Rapunzel, curtseying, but Eugene has noticed the tension in her back, and immediately steps forward. Kristoff’s eyes narrow. The two got along fine at the funeral, but now the tension is getting drawn out like a harpstring.

Fortunately, Anna is there.

“Hey!” she says, “did you make the ice roses, Elsa?”

“Huh? Oh. Yes.”

“They’re _beautiful_!”

Rapunzel frowns slightly, before noticing that each of the huge vases contains not living roses but exquisite, delicate roses made of glass – no, _ice_. Each glows blue, green, purple, all the colours of ice, and is rimmed in frost.

“How is it not cold in here?” asks Rapunzel.

“Yes,” says Elsa, and she is watching Rapunzel very carefully as she speaks, “How is it.”

It is not a question.

The two do not speak for the remainder of the ceremony, and Rapunzel and Eugene leave without a word to either the couple or the Queen.

**v.** **Symptoms**

Eugene is sick.

It started as a sniffle.

Now, his skin is pale, and clammy. He tries to brush it off – “Just haven’t been eating enough fruit” – but even Rapunzel can see is having trouble moving.

She tries to summon the tears, the Sun’s power that once moved through her, but even when they come, even when she sings the song, at most it brings relief.

The next day, he will be the same.

And then the day after.

Rapunzel has an endless stream of tears, and an endless stream of song, but none will help.

He slowly gets worse. His hair lies damp and lifeless against his forehead, his skin hangs off his bones, sallow and pale.

She starts reading. Each day, she consumes more and more books, desperately trying to find an answer.

The answer she finds is not to the query she asks.

**vi.** **Memory**

Anna’s belly is swelling.

Kristoff and Anna look at each other over the breakfast table, glowing, and Elsa smiles quietly to herself, and keeps the missives from Corona to herself.

“It’s kicking!” says Anna happily. Kristoff drops his breakfast roll, as Anna grabs his hand and puts it to her belly. The smile they share is at once one of awe and happiness.

Elsa quietly watches, before rising to leave.

“Don’t you want to feel?”

Elsa pauses, startled by the question. Then, slowly, she turns. She feels, suddenly, very fragile, as if composed of one thousand shards of frozen dew, any one of which might shatter and leave her broken.

“…c-can I?” she asks. She is no longer the Queen of Arendelle. She is eight years old, and her sister lies broken beneath her fingers.

“Of course,” says Anna, and Kristoff nods.

With each step comes more clarity, and more memories. The silence at the top of the mountain, in her perfect ice palace, broken abruptly by her sister; the chandelier shattering; Anna, small, tiny, shivering in her father’s arms; Anna, standing above her, frozen, blue, unmoving…forever…

And then she is looking at the swell of life beneath her sister’s belly.

She touches it, and at first, there is nothing.

Then, a small foot kicks at her, as if to confirm: I am here. I am alive.

Memory swells beneath her; being very tiny, very small, and invited to touch her mother’s belly as her father watched, beaming.

“Your little brother or sister is going to be born soon,” her mother had said.

“I want a sister,” she had replied, with all the seriousness a three-year old could muster.

And her mother had laughed, and assured her she would do her best.

**vii.** **Goodbye**

It is Eugene’s last day.

Rapunzel could not tell you how she knows, but from the moment she awoke – next to Eugene, the huge armchair her mother had installed next to his bed with a look of worry – she knew.

Eugene looks peaceful. In fact, he looks – and the thought give Rapunzel a measure of pain – exactly as he did the day he cut Rapunzel’s hair. He is smiling at her, and he raises one near-skeletal hand to stroke her cheek.

She does not cry.

She has no tears left.

“Don’t leave me.”

She would beg it, if she could. But she is drained. She is empty. It comes out as a statement.

“Everybody leaves, Goldie,” says Eugene. He continues to stroke her cheek, “Everybody.”

“What if I don’t?” she asks, “What if you’re going somewhere and I…I can’t?”

“Oh, Rapunzel,” Eugene says, and he sounds weak, “You gotta live.”

She knows what he’s inferred from her statement. She could kick herself for not seeing it. She clings to his hand, like a lost child.

In the time it takes to breathe in and out, something in Eugene changes. Something indefinable.

And he is gone.

**viii.** **Caedere**

The midwife tries to turn the instant they realize it will be breech, but it isn’t long before they realize that Anna isn’t nearly wide enough to pass the baby’s head.

“Send for the surgeon.”

“The surgeon?” Kristoff looks panicked, and Elsa has to grab him and forcibly remove him from the royal chambers, because he looks about ready to either scream or burst into tears, and Elsa isn’t sure which is worse.

“It’s going to be a caesarean,” Elsa tells him gently, whilst trying not to panic herself.

“They’re gonna cut her open?” Kristoff is fighting against Elsa, panicked the way an animal is, and Elsa would be moved to tears if she weren’t trying to hold him back.

“ _Yes_. Otherwise you will lose both your child and your wife. This way, they may _both_ have a chance.”

“But…but…” Kristoff is mad with fright, and Elsa does the only thing she can think of to get him to sit down and shut up.

She hugs him.

Kristoff hesitates…and then he hugs back, squeezing hard. He shakes as he does, from fear. Possibly, from cold – Elsa has never been sure exactly how cold she feels to others.

Hours pass.

“Your Majesty…” a surgeon appears, bloody to the elbows, and Elsa is already past him, running to her sister.

The room is awash with gore. A baby cries, and Anna looks pale, but alive.

Elsa collapses against the wall, and breathes a sigh of relief.

For today, at least, all is well.

**ix.** **Tempus fugit**

Rapunzel is starting to suspect that something is wrong.

It has been five years since nothing was wrong, four years since her father’s death and Eugene’s illness, and she should look different. Her instinct _says_ she should. She should look older, the mourning should have worn away at her, made wrinkles at her eyes, made grooves in her cheeks.

They have not.

She wakes every morning, brushes her short hair (which has not grown one inch since Eugene cut it, to her bafflement), and stares, for five minutes, in the mirror.

Her face looks exactly as it did that spring morning that she celebrated her twenty-first birthday.

She hears the guards whispering, how the years do not affect her, how the sadnesses do not age her, how griefs do not touch her.

She sighs.

The books she read as Eugene slipped away were correct.

She makes arrangements to travel to Arendelle, and as she goes to bid her mother farewell, she notices that her mother seems thinner than before. She frowns then sighs.

Everyone dies.

**x.** **The Second Meeting**

Elsa hears a knock at her door and laughs merrily.

“Oh, _Anna_ , I’ve already held him already, do you really _need_ me to hold him again?”

The words and laughter die on her tongue when she opens the door and sees Rapunzel there.

“Oh.” The word comes out at Absolute Zero, “Hello, Rapunzel.”

“Elsa,” says Rapunzel, in a voice like solid steel, “we need to talk.”

“No ‘Your Majesty’s? I’m impressed,” replied the Queen of Arendelle coolly.

The slam of the door behind Rapunzel silences Elsa, though Elsa’s only response is to raise an eyebrow at her.

“We’re connected,” says Rapunzel softly into the echoing silence that follows.

“Usually I get that from the Princes of the Southern Isles. Did you get that from Eugene?”

“I’m serious. Or have you not noticed that neither of us age?”

Elsa is silent. While Anna is slowly gaining laugh lines and dimples from her marriage with Kristoff and her small son, Elsa is as still and unchanging as the heart of winter.

“Have you not noticed that when good things happen in Arendelle, bad things happen in Corona?”

“Nonsense,” replies Elsa nervously, stroking her fingers, as if longing to remove a glove.

“You can’t hide from this forever!” snarls Rapunzel, in a tone that would have startled Eugene, “We’re _poisoning_ them!”

“My sister is happily married with a husband and child. I fail to see how I have poisoned anybody.”

Rapunzel glares heatedly at Elsa, before storming off.

In the quiet that follows, Elsa conjures an ice figurine of a family: Anna, Kristoff, their son and herself.

As long as they are fine, she tells herself, she has done no harm.

**xi.** **Coronation**

Rapunzel blinks at her mother dumbly.

“You…what?”

“I am retiring, and appointing you Queen of Corona,” she smiles fondly at her daughter, “It’s been done before. And as I am not in the best of health, I thought it best to retire early.”

“But…I always thought I’d have Eugene.”

“I know, dearest,” she hugs Rapunzel, “but the throne must continue.”

The coronation ceremony is huge, and Kristoff, though not Anna, attends.

“Ah, Prince Kristoff…” says Rapunzel, smiling. Kristoff looks strained, but he tries to smile back, “How is the Princess?”

“She is…not well, Majesty.”

“Oh?”

“A summer fever, the doctors say,” Kristoff gives up trying to look courtly, and settles for just ‘unhappy’. He does not like that Elsa sent him away when Anna needed him, and Rapunzel can tell that he knows that Elsa could trust no one else.

“A summer fever…”

The look that crosses Rapunzel’s face gives Kristoff the creeps. She looks as if she is staring through the air, through the things that make the universe, reading the very essence of time itself.

“…that must bother your sister-in-law deeply, yes?”

Kristoff blinks. It has been so long since the wedding, he has almost forgotten the bone-deep tension that struck up instantly between a woman made of sun and a woman composed of ice.

“Well…they’re sisters.”

“But the fact that it’s a summer fever. Something that _Elsa_ should be able to cure.”

“I…I never…I didn’t think about it like that…uh, if Your Majesty will excuse me…”

“Of course.”

She continues to stand by the window, reading the patterns in the wind, as Kristoff flees the ballroom, his skin crawling.

**xii.** **Fire**

Kristoff and Anna’s son grew up quiet, observant and with a cold streak to him. When Olaf tried to show him a butterfly, gently resting on a hyacinth, the boy quickly grabbed the insect by its wings and started ripping its legs off, before tearing its wings to pieces. When his parents came by, startled by Olaf’s screams, they scolded the boy, and Kristoff sternly lectured him.

He acted repentant, but his eyes burned with the fierceness of a winter storm.

“Auntie Elsa?” he asked one day.

“Yes, dear?” she said, looking out the window, “Oh, I _do_ love autumn. Don’t you?”

“It’s all right. I was wondering: can your ice melt?”

The queen looked puzzled, but responded:

“All ice melts in its time.”

The boy nodded solemnly, and walked off.

Elsa stared in the window. She was thirty-six years old, but still looked exactly as she did when she was twenty-one.

“Elsa?” said a voice.

“I’m getting a lot of visitors today,” she said with a laugh, “What is it, Anna?”

“Have you seen Joseff?” Anna at thirty-three looked not all that different from Anna at eighteen. She was taller, held herself better, and her eyes were rimmed with laugh lines – but she still wore greens, her skin still freckled, and she still giggled like a schoolgirl. But she wasn’t giggling now. She was frowning, and was still pale – the summer fever still lingered, though it had been mostly fought off.

“Oh, he was by here just now. Why?”

Anna made a noise of frustration.

“I don’t know, maybe we spoiled him too much growing up…” she threw herself on Elsa’s bed and sighed, “He’s just been so _ungovernable_ lately. Killing bugs, kicking the kids in the street – do you know, he threw hot ash at Olaf? He wanted to see him melt.”

“He… _what_?” A horrible sense of dread was rising in Elsa.

“He threw hot ash. From the bedpan. Didn’t _do_ anything, of course, the ash all burned out before it reached him, but…” Anna glances up at Elsa and sees the look on her face, “Elsa? What’s wrong?”

“He asked me if my ice melted…”

Anna freezes before jumping to her feet and running to the corridor, screaming for her son and Olaf.

Elsa stares out of the window.

“A coronation…” she whispers, “…and a destruction.”

Slowly, she leaves the castle, feeling wearier than her years. She has reached the gates when she hears the crackle of fire.

“ _JOSEFF!_ ”

It is Kristoff, and he is screaming for his son.

Elsa feels no panic.

She feels no fear.

She knows only that this was always going to happen, ever since the caesarean cut them open ten years ago.

The autumn winds catch the fire, and whip into an inferno, and Elsa watches as Olaf, Anna, and Joseff are caught in the flames of the palace.

**xiii.** **Tick Tock**

Time passes.

Kristoff and Sven leave Arendelle. Elsa is not surprised, merely numb.

In Corona, there is rumour of an upcoming wedding. Elsa does not go, and so is unsurprised when a missive comes from the Southern Isles declaring war.

The army musters, leaves, with several snowlems on board. The Southern Isles bow before them like a sapling before the hurricane.

A new missive awaits Elsa. The previous Queen of Corona has passed away.

More time passes. She watches, sadly, as her old staff pass away, as new staff are hired. They tiptoe around her.

She watches, too, as the new palace is completed, and is uncomfortable in it. It does not have the paintings Anna would talk to, the books Elsa would read, the tapestries the two would make fun of, and Elsa wonders if it was her touch on Anna’s swelling belly that made Joseff the way he was.

Elsa wonders, too, how long it will take the Queen of Corona to seek a meeting with her.

**xiv.** **Tock Tick**

Time flies.

Rapunzel can see Arendelle’s battleships from the tallest tower in the palace. She watches them sail past, gilded with frost, carrying huge monsters of snow, and wonders when she should do it.

Her mother grows thinner, tireder, wearier. No tears can stop this, and when she dies, Rapunzel barely flinches, and ponders the significance of her lack of emotions.

She stops wearing pink, starts wearing dark blue. She likes it more. It suits her frame of mind.

Time flies, and she knows she cannot put it off longer. Each day, she goes and visits Eugene’s grave, and each day she can remember less of his smile, and each day she knows it means less and less to her.

And one day, she forgets to go.

“Today,” she says, when she realizes that she forgot to go to her love’s grave.

“What, dear?” asks her king, a marriage of convenience. He is old, now, but he has eyes like the cloud at winter’s height.

“Today I die.”

Time flies.

**xv.** **The Final Meeting**

Elsa is eighty-nine years old. She looks twenty-one and impatient, as she taps her nails against the wood of her throne.

The doors to her throne room open, and a slim figure with short brown hair and a dark blue dress stands there.

“Rapunzel,” says Elsa evenly.

“Elsa.”

The Queen of Arendelle smoothly stands and walks towards the Queen of Corona. The two evenly examine one another.

“Pink suited you better,” says Elsa finally.

“Family suited _you_ better.”

Elsa slaps Rapunzel, and a sudden burst of white light surprises the two.

“Ah,” says Rapunzel, unruffled, “I was right.”

“What?”

“I… _we_ …can end this.”

“By what? Hitting each other?”

“If you like?” shrugs Rapunzel, “It would be easier, however, to just touch one another.”

Elsa scowls briefly, before holding out a hand to Rapunzel, who takes it.

This time, it starts slowly. Their fingernails start to glow white, then their hands. The light travels up their arms, to their shoulders, down their breasts, their stomachs. Soon, it’s hard to tell how much their bodies are alight, because the air is filled with it, and to both women, it feels as if they are finally alive again, after sixty years of worry and suffering, they are alive. They can feel it all: the pain of the deaths around them, the joy of the victories, the sorrow of the losses. Rapunzel can feel the fear of the fire at Arendelle palace, and Elsa can feel the grief of the sickness of the previous Queen of Corona.

“What…is this?” asks Elsa.

“Have you ever heard the idea that making ice is just a process of moving heat?”

“Of course.”

“Well,” says Rapunzel, and as the white light claims their eyes, she’s not sure if it’s her voice she’s using, Elsa’s voice, or both, “it’s a bit like that. Except not.”

**xvi.** **Epilogue (Sublimination)**

Kristoff is an old man now, and Sven is an old reindeer. The two saw the bright light that was the two women (or, really, one force in two bodies) touching hands.

The two go into Arendelle. The palace has had closed gates since the death of Anna and Joseff, but it’s open now, but nobody is brave enough to go anywhere near it, except the old Sami man and his reindeer.

He walks towards the throne room and is startled to hear a small gurgling noise at his feet.

Looking down, he sees a small baby girl. Her eyes are huge and green, and what little hair she has is blonde.

He sighs sadly, before picking the baby up, wrapping it in his red bandanna, and leaving.

When stopped by the guard, he simply responds:

“She’s family.”

 

_Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed._


End file.
